Let's see
So let's see why am I not
okay can you guys see me when I'm speaking yes okay hi Emily, Tom Crawford, the geography of
virginia tech, one of our co-sponsors. um okay so hi everybody I'm Maria Elisa Christie. I'm the director
of women and gender in international development at the center for international research education
and development at Virginia Tech. So welcome to our virtual women and gender in international
development discussion series at Virginia Tech. We are very happy that you could all join us um
and thanks to our co-sponsors the Department of Geography and also Women and Gender Studies here at
Virginia Tech. So please note that our event will be recorded and available on our website later
so if you by staying on now you're consenting to being recorded and you can turn off your camera
if you don't want your image recorded. So that our the full calendar of our discussion series
can be seen on our website and uh Lumbini our graduate assistant for the program will put
that into the chat. So before introducing our speaker I do want to read our uh land and labor
acknowledgment statement at Virginia Tech. So Virginia Tech and invite you to reflect on it
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diversity and excellence we commit to advancing a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive community.
Okay some brief uh housekeeping notes now this the discussion will last approximately 45 minutes, our
speaker's presentation will be about half an hour followed by about 15 minutes of discussion in q&a
and I will formally close at um at the end of an hour at 2:30 but we'll have a few minutes to stay
if somebody wants to stay on after that just a little bit. So all dialing participants will be
muted to enable the speaker to present without interruption. You're welcome to post questions
you'd like to ask in the chatbox and you can post them at any time and I'll read them to our
speaker at the end of the presentation if we have time and there's more questions after those in the
chat people can raise their hand and the webinar controls and we'll ask you to unmute yourself and
you can ask the speaker the question or make your comments directly toward the end of the session.
So in order for our discussion to be as rich as it can be we need everyone to be respectful and treat
all participants with kindness and consideration and without discriminatory behavior so again
the webinar is being recorded and you will have access to it via our website a couple weeks after
the after the end of this and please answer the survey that we'll share at the end and we will
invite your feedback. Okay now what you've really been waiting for now to introduce our speaker
we have a very special women's month speaker with us today dr farhana sultana and i'm always happy
to host a fellow geographer at our discussion series I realize that for many she needs no
introduction with over 70 publications and last I checked on google scholar almost 5000 citations
take that those of you who are trying to get things published.
Oh my gosh okay um and we did send out the article um uh on critical climate justice that she
she published with the royal geographical society uh to those of you registered and it will also be
in the chat and uh you can also go to her website and see all the other things that
she's written and makes available to people so all right but I am still going to give some
detail even though she doesn't need introduction because we have a broad array of participants
we had 138 registered as of half an hour ago from 21 countries from institutions as different as
the Scottish government, the Norwegian institute of international affairs,
the Ohio environmental council, and World vision international; as well as academic institutions
from the UK, the US, Canada, India and Australia and maybe more since the last time I looked at that
and we also have faculty, staff, and students from very different departments in our own university
Virginia Tech. So we have a very diverse crowd so okay so a little more about our speaker Dr. Sultana
is an associate professor in the department of geography and the environment at the Maxwell
school of citizenship and public affairs of Syracuse University where she's also the
research director for environmental collaboration and conflicts at the program for advancement
of research on conflicts and collaboration. She is also an internationally recognized
interdisciplinary scholar of political ecology, water governance, post-colonial development, social
and environmental justice, climate change, and feminism. Her research and scholar activism draw
from her experiences of having lived and worked on three continents as well as her backgrounds
in the natural sciences, social sciences, and her policy experience prior to joining Syracuse. She
taught at king's college london and worked at the united nations development program
she graduated Cum laude from Princeton University in geosciences and environmental
studies and obtained her master's and Ph.D. in geography from the University of Minnesota
where she was a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellow. She was awarded the Glenda
laws award from the American Association of geographers for outstanding contributions
to geographical research on social issues in 2019. So the title of her talk today is
climate justice, gender, and challenges in a fractured world. Please welcome Dr. Farhana Sultana!
Thank you so much Maria Elisa for such a wonderful and generous introduction uh thank you, everyone
for joining us from wherever you may be around the world um and I'm really grateful to be here
and especially to all the colleagues at Virginia Tech University for making this possible and for
inviting me to speak with you so today I want to speak to you about feminist climate justice what
it means and why I think it's important. So let me just go ahead and share some slides I just have
a few slides to show to go with my talk and I'm happy to elaborate further and the paper that this
talk is derived from came out a few months ago and I believe um it was just shared in the chatbox
you can also download a pdf of it from my website which is literally but my name dot com farhana
sultana.com so the reason why I wanted to talk about this topic was because so much
the conversation has arisen in recent years around climate change, climate breakdown
there's a lot of concern around it um as it should be and so what we're going to do today
is try to understand certain specific aspects of it and I'll talk a little quickly because I'm
covering a lot of ground but I'm happy to discuss further so when we think about climate change one
way to think about it is to at least understand the basics I'm not going to assume everyone has
the same context so just a very brief overview. So global events of climate-related disasters
have become more profound and as a result there's been more attention to climate justice
and because the injustices from climate breakdown have been overlapping with
for instance, the COVID 19 pandemic we are beginning to see where the fault lines of
society is or where the economic and political conditions of um suffering are being created
at different scales but at different sites so what a climate justice framework does is it helps us
think through and address these inequities that have become very visible in the last couple of
years of the pandemic but even longer over decades over several places around the world
so what climate justice does is it demonstrates how climate change is an ethical and justice issue
not just a science or techno managerial issue and given that the intergovernmental panel on climate
change or the IPCC assessments even the one that was released or just a couple of weeks ago
have warned us of severe exacerbating vulnerabilities of with global uh greenhouse gas
emissions rising global temperatures we still know that action has been relatively slow even though
these reports keep coming out um and as a result we're seeing greater and greater need for more
active engagement. So what climate justice does is it starts to foster those kinds of engagements
and conversations because we're starting to look at what are the social impacts of climate change?
what are his political outfalls and economic injustices that come in its wake? We know that
climate change is a threat multiplier so climate justice fundamentally is about paying attention to
and working to address those threat multipliers to understand how different people are impacted
differentially, unevenly, and disproportionately and how they result in injustices can be redressed
in fair and equitable ways so that we can dismantle or confront the systems that create the
marginalizations and exploitations and oppressions. So as a result we're really talking about climate
change is a political issue so climate justice approach asks us to really question our political
commitments. It's an intentional process to analyze who's been left out of conversations who have been
marginalized over what time and space what are the different for instance outcomes of
adaptation or mitigation interventions being taken in climate's name and seeing what kind of
exacerbations of vulnerability or marginalizations are created through those processes themselves so
what we do with the climate justice approach is we start to investigate who benefits, who loses out
in what ways where and why and as a result we can think about climate justice to be
explanatory tool. So it's an intentional process but it's also an explanatory tool at our disposal
to look at how these different processes of injustices are co-created and maintained.
We know that there have been historical and geographical differences
that in terms of production of climate change and in terms of the impacts that are being played out.
So climate justice helps us have those conversations around why did this come to be
we start to have conversations around histories of colonialism, capitalism, globalization, extractivism
all of these processes are imbricated in the production of uneven climate injustices
and critiques of these interlocking systems of oppression are increasingly being
ushered into mainstream debates and climate justice because to have justice it becomes
imperative first to identify the injustices that exist and then address underlying causes of them
instead of just applying band-aid solutions. So climate justice is essentially about praxis
and praxis means theoretically informed practice with reflection so there are continual feedback
and integrations and in broad terms, we're seeing that climate justice movements around the world
are helping us think through the practice of demanding systemic change to redress structural
inequities and destabilize power systems that produce those injustices I was just
alluding to equity considerations mean reducing harms and removing sources of harm
so commitment or underlying commitment of climate justice is largely about political action and
solidarity movements, so critical approaches to climate justice look at issues such as
responsibility, exposure, vulnerability, and ethics because climate justice is accountability, it is
about accountability and obligations and human rights. So when we think about the global political
economy or the systems that produce and reinforce temporal and spatial harms we start to have these
conversations about which communities are being impacted, which movements have trying to address
these issues and how can we get involved with different actors and different groups at different
scales and at different locations. So climate justice as praxis comes from root place-based
rooted actions but it is also informed by various academic theories such as feminism, critical race
theory, anti-capitalist theory, post-colonial declinal and anti-colonial scholarship because
we start to see what these different theoretical interventions help us in theorizing and thinking
about movements, practical action and political interventions. So while climate justice has had
a lot of uptake in academia in recent years there have been actually praxis or solidarity movements
for a long time, it was actually at the 2002 which is 20 years ago at the 2002 conference of parties
or the COP on climate change where climate justice first entered the scene. It involved grassroots
initiatives and activist alliances were working in collaboration across place-based mobilizations and
they were talking about climate justice at a large international climate negotiation and conference.
So we see that climate justice has largely been practiced and that we're seeing more
and more young people get involved but at the same time we know that it's derived from
a lot of place-based activities from labor unions, farmer movements um indigenous movements and so
on and increasingly we're seeing the youth movement and climate justice in recent years
so what does it mean to understand climate justice in this way to think about the fact
there's an overarching commonality even if different movements are doing different things.
It's because we're they're all trying to expose the root causes of climate change where they are
but then also across places and times and they're also talking about how do we dismantle these
systemic and structural concerns and the systems that produce and reproduce these harms so some of
these include dismantling fossil fuel dependency, de-fetishizing endless growth on a finite planet,
challenging non-participatory democracy, resisting extractive exploitation of natural resources, and
peoples and indigenous ideas among other things. So when we think about climate justice as basically
undergirded by concerns around equity fairness and reparations we start to pay closer attention
to these complexities across place space and scale and this necessitates a much more
nuanced but much more comprehensive approach to our understanding and it also recognizes that it's
we need to start asking questions around power and power structures and political disparities and how
these are embedded within multiscaler issues such as broader political economy of trade relations,
international development, neoliberal globalization, and so on because related socioecological
harm or vulnerability and differential outcomes are linked to these wider issues. So we're seeing
that both from academia and outside of academia these kinds of conversations are happening
and you're seeing a lot of play space but also cross-scalar solidarities that are being enacted.
So when we talk about climate and justices historically and these different movements that
have often been violently erased or suppressed and oppressed by their own states by different
governments, different corporations we see that there are large parts of the global south or
the so-called post-colonial world that has been dealing with climate impacts and has been trying
to resist the different oppressions for quite some time. So we see outcomes of such things as tropical
cyclones, uh floods, sea-level rise, heat waves, wildfires, land erosion, and so on but we're seeing
them increasingly being experienced across the what is called the global north or the advanced
industrialized world and we're seeing increasing numbers of compounded harms. So numbers of deaths
losses displacements and high recovery costs but then also communities that are increasingly
vulnerabilized because it's a compounding effect in terms of who pays the highest price longer
and as a result, scholars have been using terms such as climate apartheid that some parts of
the world have been experiencing climate injustice for longer but they have not been heard or heeded
and as a result, we can start to talk about how the advanced industrialized world owes the uh
historically exploited and historically made to be impoverished countries a climate debt. A climate
debt is one that involves understanding and recognizing the slow violence of climate change
to racialized and impoverished communities across the world and looking at how racial capitalism and
colonialism along with neoliberal globalization are compounding climate injustices through such
things as a development ideology, trade warfare and so on so because past injustices make people
more vulnerable. We need to therefore think about that historical accountability the unequal
ecological exchange, climate deaths and so on, and thinking about climate reparations. So this brings
me to the main point of the paper that you have access to about how I theorize what a feminist
climate justice or critical climate justice is and this is because what's become really apparent over
the last couple of decades is that climate justice movements benefit from feminist theory whether it
carries the banner of feminism or not because when we think about um the different forms of ways that
justice has been theorized or understood we really start to see the importance of
the different forms of theoretical formations that come into play in understanding both theories
of justice whether that's recognition justice, distributive justice, reparative justice or so on
but critical feminist analysis helps us understand what the overlooked or buried concerns are because
where they're therefore able to expose various inequities and harms that may not be relevant
uh to a lot of different people in power or may not seem apparent to those who are still trying
to understand what's going on because feminist scholarship often tends to also incorporate
insights from anti-racist anti-colonial and the colonial scholarship to advance justice-oriented
praxis we can benefit from incorporating that from much more capacious climate justice movements and
indeed it was actually at the COP in 2007 so that was 15 years ago where we first heard the term "no
climate justice without gender justice" and it was a rallying cry from activists and social movements
and we've seen that also women have been at the forefront of the climate justice
movements across the world and they have raised awareness of the importance of paying attention
to the differential intersectional gendered burdens and harms around the world and at the same
time there's also increasing conversations about what are the ways we can start to think about
injustice not just in a place but intersectional within that place within that society
so as a result we're um increasing scholarship but then also practice-based movements
have looked at intersectional gendered marginalizations, inequities, burdens, and
vulnerability from various types of climate breakdown. Whether it's agrarian loss, floods,
erosions, displacement and so on because we know that climate is uneven unequal and long-lasting
depending on who you are where you live and what you have. What critical or transnational feminism
a feminist scholarship does it helps us identify the often invisibilized contours of suffering and
those interlocking oppressions that exist in that society and then how it then links up to wider
skills to wider issues of inequities that i was just talking to and then how we can talk about the
different types of justice and where that justice can be derived from what kind of allocations of
resources and attention need to be given and then how can we center different teachings
from feminism to formulate better policies and projects that help improve life for everyone
so what we know as feminist scholars is that we we look at iterative and multiple knock-on effects
from the socioecological changes to gender relations in any con
any context by looking at for instance what are the ways that intersectionality as a
concept helps us understand communities as not homogeneous, how do we investigate and address
context contextual axis of oppression whether it's by race, class, indigeneity, migrant status and so on.
So for instance climate-fueled water scarcity means more women and girls are spending more
time and labor and fetching water around the world that in itself is an issue that is um
something a lot of communities and organizations and nation-states are trying to intervene in how
do we deal with the water crisis because climate change is effectively about water right too much
too little wrong time wrong place. So someone like me who's been a water scholar for about 25 years
um and also been as climate scholar for me this is very intuitive it's always connected
but it isn't so for everyone so when we think about a feminist climate justice scholarship
we start to understand how patriarchy compounds these forms of intersectional harms and burdens
and sufferings and life opportunities in terms of schooling, education, leisure, and well-being
but then we also know to not essentialize women and men into binary categories but
look at the different forms of exploitation and harms but at the same time look at how
different theories of gender help us look at how risks responsibilities and rights exist
in that community in terms of understanding the different ways people are minoritized and excluded
or silenced so feminist insights into critical climate justice can foster inclusive planning
and action beyond techno managerialistic utopias that never really deliver.
It can also help us strengthen women's movements for strategic activism, advocacy, capacity building,
allocation of resources and network access. So these are both place-based but they're
also beyond places they're linked places and scales and groups and group people to address
things that are happening on the ground locally but also things that are happening globally.
What feminist climate justice does is it documents women's lived experiences and elevates different
voices and as a result, we start to have a much more complex and nuanced understanding of what
climate justice is beyond just what people think climate justice is because we're able to therefore
understand people's abilities to cope, to adapt, to renew, to flourish, or what are the obstacles to
that happening in different places so as a result feminist analysis and praxis continue a feminist
tradition of inquiry into inequities and injustices and this, therefore, helps us
better theorize climate justice but it also helps us better figure out different intervention points
because feminism promotes keener attention to context by underscoring connections between people
and by elevating awareness of these links once we start to see the similarities and differences
between different groups of people we can address shortcomings systematically and frame policies in
more equitable ways and because the goal is to not just create cookie cutter solutions but to tailor
make the ones that make most sense to each context but at the same time learn from other contexts
so there again is that praxis that loopback that feedback and that loop that is ever-present
but at the same time having said all this I also recognize that feminism is not a magic bullet if
it was we'd be deploying it everywhere right there are a lot of different issues that do require
technical, scientific or financial investment then we have to deal with those on their own terms but
what critical feminist inquiry does is it helps us think about what are the budgetary allocations
who's making the decisions who's at the table or rather what is the table what are the terms of the
debate rather than just having representation at the debate right. So we start to think about
public policy uh in much more capacious ways and so finally what feminism does is that it helps
us provide um better ways to think about road maps or recovery road maps or analysis and advocacy and
action to overcome the biggest challenges of our time that climate breakdown is
bringing about around the world but at the same time it helps us also
imagine or create and promote much more equitable and fair and well-being centered
solutions going forward. So when we think about moving forward what does that mean so
many different approaches have been kind of put forth I'll just touch up on some of them. So for
instance a lot of feminist scholars and related uh aegis and scholars have talked about moving from
extractive-based economy to a regenerative economy. These include reciprocity redistribution of power
and self-determination reparations care and care networks divestment solidarity across differences
recognizing differentiated responsibilities and cosmologies and not universalism
also transformation of public institutions for deep democracy public finance and reformulation
of international institutions and guidelines. So it's a range of different ways to think about
how the world works, so for instance there have been increased rhetoric of build back better in a
post-pandemic era of climate change both in the US and elsewhere so what a feminist climate justice
epistemology does is it makes us ask questions such as what does that mean, what does build back
better entail, who is deciding this what will be improved, where will this take place, who will it
benefit, why, what are its externalities, and how do we internalize those externalities? So when we
think about post-pandemic recovery we can start to ask questions like it may not be gender sensitive
unless it is made to be so or race sensitive uh response unless it is made to be so so we can
look at how do we address rapidly compounding injustices through a much more gender-centric
or gender-just planning for post-pandemic recovery so that climate justice offers us pathways forward
that are both just and sustainable but are also equitable and fair. So many climate justice
activists and scholars have called for moving away from fossil fuel-based recovery uh not just
to slow down climate breakdown but for better fiscal recovery that includes climate financing
that is gender accountable. uh some recent examples put forth by activists um are the feminist green
new deal in the USA and the feminist fossil free future in the Asia-Pacific. There are plenty more
so what these endeavors do is basically require multi-scalar gender disaggregated data collection,
gender monitoring, accountability, adequate capacity building, and budgetary resource allocations for
both intersectional analysis and responsiveness; and then figuring out what the redresses that are
necessary, who needs to be involved in this. So when we raise awareness about these issues demonstrate
the interconnections across places to show that they're not only isolated we can start to see how
domestic solutions or national policy or local policy are connected to wider issues and we can
start to think about wider impacts and much more work in a much more concerted way with different
groups across places. Therefore reframing climate debates with insights from various
feminist insights and solidarity practices helps us to not only unearth issues but then redress
root causes instead of just seeking out very quick fixes or techno managerialistic solutions.
It also helps us think about how do we confront patriarchy in communities but also in institutions
in policy making and budgetary budget making. um it recognizes the importance of intersectional
gender analysis, the importance of disaggregated data collection about ethics and research design,
about collaborative planning and critical reflexivity. So again various insights from
feminist methodologies and epistemologies come into the foray. So let me just conclude
given the wide-ranging nature of this talk that I went through fairly quickly
because I just want to highlight some key messages and I want to then open it up for conversation
because the talk was originally that was asked from me was supposed to be 20 minutes but I said
can we go a little bit longer just so I can say a little bit more then we have more to talk about
but I do want to wrap up with a few things so we know that climate justice has become this
rallying cry across the globe and climate justice is ultimately about obligations and ethical
relations with people and ecosystems that we are materially and politically connected to whether we
understand that or not. The important thing is to recognize this and then do something about
it because climate change is basically a moral problem and a justice concern. It is not just an
economic or scientific one, it is not just about finance and technology but a shift in mindsets
in terms of framing, in terms of conversations, in terms of action. So climate justice therefore is as
much about development and democracy and citizenship as well as about international
financing, trade rules, uh different forms of institutional arrangements and so on. So when
we think about what does an attention to feminist climate justice do, it it really encourages policy
makers and citizens to approach climate change in more comprehensive ways but it also moves the
conversation around metaphorical understandings of climate justice to be much more about critical
climate justice and understanding the feminist insights that have been incorporated into it.
It calls for an accountability to intersectional analysis so that lived experiences and wisdom
of differently situated subjects are heeded and appropriated and inclusive policies and programs
are planned. So for instance paying attention to power relations that exist in any context becomes
important in fine-tuning and addressing inequities, marginalization, and vulnerabilities where they're
being created but then also reconfiguring what are the different ways we can think about these
issues and how are they tied to wider issues related to for instance housing justice or uh
binary uh bilateral trade uh regulations so why it widens the conversation is what I'm trying to say.
So advancing a critical feminist climate justice means making more meaningful and inclusive uh
strategies it's about recognizing and reducing the harms by gender, race, class and degenerating and
so on that occur within and across communities. It also means addressing reducing the things
that create those harms so again going back to greenhouse gas emissions, going back to different
forms of production, consumption, and disposal and systemic waste it's about sharing the burdens of
change and not further compounding sufferings. So climate justice research and praxis necessitate
deploying those forms of feminist insights to be more comprehensively accountable to various
systemic injustices that overlap and compound. So unless we understand that overlapping compounding
we feel helpless in moving forward so what I try to do is encourage people to how do we think about
de-centering powerful voices so we can re-center voices that have historically been excluded or
silenced, how do we learn from lived experiences from marginalized groups and communities
when we talk about climate change impacts whether local or global what are the ways
we can think about intersectional rights and risks and responsibilities, how do we get away from
cookie cutter approaches or one size fits all and so therefore we see that decision makers
and powerful actors when they start to heed these kinds of attention to paying attention to uh
gender and other axes of differentiation we can start to avoid those reductionist solutions but
rather pursue those that are more just and equitable. Ultimately what I want to do is help
people think about how do we revolutionize the way we think about climate change. So think about more
in terms of feminist or critical climate justice instead we need to think about systems change that
are needed for this critical feminist climate justice to confront capitalist extractivism
and climate colonialism. So we need to therefore center collaborations that are meaningful, that
are impactful because in the end there is no quick and easy way out of this mess that we are in right
there is no one solution there is no one climate movement that is going to help everything. This is
a constellation of acts and actors across places and scales and this is hard work. It is complex and
challenging so we need to continually investigate and expose and understand what we also need to
critically reflect uh unlearn to relearn so that we're then able to imagine in more capacious ways
because if we cannot in re-imagine uh conferring pathways forward that are different
we're not going to create those visions um and change uh thinking and doing so that we don't
seek those universalist solutions or one truths or eurocentric formulas that have gotten us into this
mess in the first place. So we need to think about both context but also histories and geographies of
difference and similarities so the concrete sorry the concrete differences need to be recognized and
tackled systemically or else restorative measures will ultimately fail collapsing
under the weight of their own inequality. So when we think about doing better and doing more
we need to continually take stock of the various collectivities for equitable and
transformative practices because this is the only way we're going to move forward for much more just
futures and much more sustainable and flourishing lives going forward.
Thank you all for listening and if you'd like to learn more about the research article that
this talk draws from um it is on my website it is called critical climate justice so feel
free to visit it or download it. I'm at farhannasultana.com. uh so thank you again for listening.
Excellent! thank you so much Dr. Sultana um let's see okay so we've got uh we've got
four questions including the last one's mine but if we don't have time for mine
that's fine so first uh let me read them in order so Wafa Al-Daily, Dr. Wafa Al-Daily
asked can you please explain how has climate justice concept been applied in conflict-prone
fragile states and conflict and war zones? How has it been enforced and reinforced to protect
the most vulnerable groups, including women, children and minority groups?
um all right okay so a lot of areas that are conflict-prone or have um histories of
violence and warfare uh they're often sites of extractivism. Right so whether it's fossil
fuels, uh rare earth minerals, uh water or land grabs, we've seen a lot of different ways that
people have been marginalized and displaced and there have been different types of resource grabs
uh that have been occurring. So there's an undergirding um a connection between in my opinion
between the different types of conflicts we're seeing that are tied to the very resources that um
most of us as human society or species rely on and and I think we need to understand those
connections once we start to see those connections we can start to see that yes there's warfare here
and there's great suffering and great loss and death and destruction but what are the key drivers
uh to this? And then I think we can start to have these once we start to see these conversations we
can move the conversation between X-people don't get along with Y-people right and
that tends to be about identity politics devoid of that material connection so when we started
the wider political ecology of warfare we can start to see the different ways that um you know
extractivism and capitalist extractivism has been linked to uh to these places to these people who
are the actors involved but in terms of plan if the question if I understood it correctly was it
about climate justice movement specifically if there are movements in places of warfare
you I'm not entirely sure understood the question um because in times of war often times
various activist movements are suspended right because it ends up being about life and death.
I'm not entirely sure if climate justice movements are always active in places of active warfare
but they are often active in places of conflict right conflict is not necessarily warfare
but I don't know to what extent that was the question of unless I misunderstood.
Well so why don't you unmute yourself and clarify if uh if you can please?
Yeah sure what I meant is like usually when conflict zones and war zones there is no
presentation for minorities, women, children they're not protected and we're talking about
um environment justice usually they are the most affected by any kind of inequalities. Let's say
because of the war because of the um climate changes in their in their areas so
this concept is in conflict its own areas and how this being reinforced to protect this
type of groups in in these areas? Usually the as you said the state is not there
conflict is exist, international communities are contributing to trying to solve the problems or
bring peace to to the area and we're talking about the climate justice and the injustice in in this
area so this is something uh I am wondering. Do we care can we apply this concept and conflicts of
zone areas if yes to which extent we can enforce uh and reinforce the concept of climate justice?
How we can protect these vulnerable communities in war zones? I hope that just explain my question.
Okay yes I think I understood a little bit better now thank you for that um so yes I
think one of the things that uh that comes up is that you're right in terms of as I was saying
in times of war or active conflict, you do have a suspension of other things that are happening
and the same groups that have um are suffering from climate breakdown are often the same groups
that are suffering during warfare. It is women and children, the elderly, disabled and so on
um and then also in terms of whose lands are uh destroyed right or you know whether
it's warfare in terms of bombs or in terms of capture for bases so there are different ways that
people are being marginalized and excluded so I think the concepts that are derived from climate
justice in terms of at least the justice aspect or at least from the feminist aspect. Yes we can
use that lens to look at instances of places of war in terms of protection in terms of
figuring out what are the ways we can help give support or reparations or direct
solidarity and aid to groups that have been um particularly harmed in sites of conflict
often times what happens is during active conflict or military engagement people are so
confirmed um concerned with violence with active violence that a lot of things get invisibilized
we know that rape of women is a very common tactic during warfare, it has been for a very very long
time so again so then you see you and HCR get involved you see other international communities
or humanitarian or refugee aid get involved because you do need those active and the times of
warfare I don't think people are actively thinking about climate in the instances of direct violence
um or or destruction but what we can do is try to see what is the the background to this those who
are not in an active conflict zone are able to see make those connections and make those critiques
but you can't necessarily use a critique to stop warfare right? That requires much more intentional
effort whether it's counter uh forms of uh you know resistance movements whether it's financial
cut off what we're seeing currently in Europe right now uh they're meant to warfare tactics
don't always apply to peacetime tactics right but at the same time we can still use different ways
to look at the way people are vulnerabilized and made disposal because we're seeing for
instance, sacrifice zones that are created through extractive mining that is contributing to climate
injustices but we can also see how warfare creates sacrifice zones of outright large groups of deaths
and destruction right it's much more ramped up whereas climate change is much more slow or fair
when if you're talking about actual political strife and in terms of violent physical violence
during those times you can similarly use those ideas of well what does it look like to protect
minority groups what does it look like to pay attention to to gender issues to protecting
children from harm and I don't think that I have a better answer for that. If I did I'd
probably be doing some peace council work. Thank you so much for that response Doctor Farhana Sultana.
Okay so next question is from Rebecca Giannotti and she says thank you Dr. Sultana. Could you please
speak about considerations of the historic gaps and issues in feminism i.e primarily
the prominence of white feminism, its lack of inclusivity particularly with regard to race
as well as exclusion of transgender women? How those issues might impact climate justice
or likewise how a climate justice approach might help build a more inclusive feminism?
Awesome thank you for that question uh so this is what I was trying to do with my work in terms of
thinking about um how do we bypass those or rather confront those issues of what you identified or
what is known as imperial feminism some people call it white feminism in terms of the way it's
been historically very exclusionary to issues of race issues of disability, issues of sexuality,
uh and also issues of colonialism. uh we know very well from a lot of different transnational
and women of color and third world feminist scholarship that there have been historically
very problematic imperial and colonial forces that had a lot of feminist so-called feminists involved
right and those forms of historical evidence give us the tools with which to think about how do we
think about climate justice or feminist climate justice that doesn't recreate that? So my uh
positionality in coming from a much more post-colonial and transnational feminist
uh training is to immediately not center that historical imperial feminist but to discard it
but and to start from a position where uh we start to have these conversations around
intersectionality which comes from black feminist thought right? In terms of thinking about how do we
center not just gender because that has all that has been used as a form of colonial and imperial
force but to center the intersectional way gender is always already undergirded by race and class.
uh you know if you think back to works of like Audrey Lord or Angela Davis and so on um or you
know post-colonial scholars uh like uh um Chandra Mohanty uh or even Sylvia Federici's work in terms
of how do we think about class? So if we take that position that it's all it's already internalized
in terms of not just gender as centrality but that intersectional way of and interlocking oppressions
we start to therefore think about climate justice or what I've argued in the paper is that it comes
from that position of taking the much more nuanced uh feminist scholarship that includes
insights from critical race theory, anti-colonial, anti-capitalist frameworks and then to build
from that and so and my goal is that if we start to have these conversations about climate justice
not centering problematic just let's say marxism which is just about class or imperial feminism
which is just about gender but have much more complex conversations that center the majority
world or speaking from the global south we start to sh you know shift the framework so instead of
speaking from the margins the margins become the center as you know Bell Hooks talked about when
you speak from a position of marginality it is also speaking from a position of strength because
you see the entirety of the problem and if we take that as the center we are able to speak to you
know back truth to power um and my hope is that in kind of fostering these conversations about
a critical feminist climate justice is to start from that premise not to make excuses that this
is what I'm doing that's different but to start from a position of strength this is what I'm doing,
these are the theoretical insights that inform it. I do not need to speak to the gaps that existed
before because they weren't helpful at all. I'm speaking from what we know now and we will improve
as we learn more that is the goal right is that unlearning and relearning over time. um so I hope
that addresses your question in terms of starting from the positions of um thinking about things
like transgender rights, thinking about you know disability rights thinking about uh what does
it mean to talk about indigeneity in Africa so that it isn't again always planet America right?
So we need to have these conversations about imperialism that America perpetuates globally.
Thank you, Dr. Sultana. um now Daniel I hope you I don't pronounce your last name wrong but Daniel Morchain
asked do you think that say, a climate adaptation initiative that addresses
questions of climate gender justice in its design undertakes gender responsive
vulnerability assessments and identifies metrics on climate justice and gender in its monitoring
and evaluation system? So do you think this is in principle a good and solid way to ensure
that climate adaptation is gender responsive and addressing justice issues? what is missing?
Oh wow okay that was a complex question hopefully back in the chat so that it's so that it's uh new
there and you can see all the words. um okay yeah I haven't been following along with chat because
there's a lot going on in the chat box yeah um all right so if I understood it uh from what you said
instead of trying to going and finding and reading it and keeping everyone on hold I'll
start from there and if I miss something please please correct me if I'm wrong. So yes so there's
been a lot of uh recent initiatives that have looked at the ways that we can think about climate
adaptation that is more gender just or in terms of its design in terms of thinking about uh climate
uh focus in terms of uh not just thinking about climate change and its impacts on communities
but in terms of thinking about um how can we uh make that or redesign it in terms of
you know much more gender-centric so if we think about it that way we can start to have these
conversations about okay what does a gender responsive vulnerability assessment look like?
What are the different matrices what do we miss when we phrase a question this way versus that way
and in principle? Yes so I think the question was in principle is this good yes in principle that
is good. um but again as we know from let's say critiques of uh gender and development or
women in development from the 70s, then gender and development in the 90s and so on in terms
of thinking about uh what are the different insights we've gained from that so I think it's
really important to look at uh feminist critiques of development and then think about one of the
feminist critiques of climate adaptation so one of the pieces I wrote many years ago was looking at
what are the ways uh if you know feminist insights can be brought into climate adaptation discussions?
um and then looking at the ways uh really that um there isn't one perfect solution for every
location and even in one location you might have something that works from one side and it needs
to be tweaked to another but you can have similar types of toolkits. So if you want to have a toolkit
that is doing xyz, you need to be able to critique and reflect back on what are the shortcomings of
that and acknowledge it and write it down like literally have some record keeping because
invisibilizing the problem doesn't make the problem go away. So one of the things that we did
learn from let's say community-based participatory development or CBNRM, community-based natural
resource management that was wild in the 1990s and 2000s is that there were really problematic
ways that people were romancing the local people, are romancing the community as the site
of all solutions and panaceas and we know that communities are quite patriarchal and there are
patronally patron-client relationships and there can be vertical hierarchies of power structures.
So once we started the critique of community and participation that came in the wake of
those projects really gave pause to international development organizations and NGOs in terms of we
can't use participation as a tyrannical tick box system, we can't go out and say yes we had
30 women well with the women were all silent and the men did all the talking did you really have
30 women present? So these are critiques that have been had in the last 20 years so how do
we learn from that to think about MnE systems, uh for climate adaptation or locally-led adaptation
that is more gender just and that is more climate just? So once you're aware of the critique you can
try to improve the project under your control but if you're not aware at all you're not going to be
able to be responsive um and have that agility to have better planning and better intervention but
I think one of the important thing is to at least recognize that yes we need to be able to do this
and then how can we have a much more flexible uh design or flexible policy implementation,
funding allocation, monitoring and evaluation assessment uh all of these tools that are often
used in various uh development and climate project planning and uh project intervention. We need to be
able to have that recognition that we need to go back to different forms of academic critique
because it is a job of the academic to critique. It is our prerogative, if we don't do the critique we
will never know what the shortcomings of various types of interventions and policies and plans were.
So therefore there needs to be that two-way system of praxis, there needs to be practice in these
projects so that you are able to therefore tweak it and improve it as you go forward.
I wish I could offer you a glass of water there. Perfect I'm sorry we're bombarding you. I do
want to ask you my question um and I'm going to put it in and it is in your article you refer to
the fetishization of resilience narratives and you use the term um people's ability to adapt cope and
renew so my question is why is it important that I put it in why is why are resilience narratives an
obstacle to addressing climate change as opposed to focusing on people's ability to adapt cope and
renew? Because there's a lot of literature on resilience and climate change and I have read
some of the feminist critiques of that term. yeah um so a lot of folks uh I've been writing about
resilience over the last five or six years in terms of the problematic way, it's been
kind of taken up across different institutions so if folks are familiar with it that this will
you know you already know the debates those who are not very familiar with it uh you know it
resilience is a term that has uh been used quite a lot over the last couple of decades it's also come
under a lot of critique in terms of the way that it's invoked but then what does it really mean
people aren't really clear but at the same time it's this expectation that you've been suffering
from these injustices but you we expect you to be resilient so you know places where I come from
we're tired of being resilient for like hundreds of years you know of colonial brutalities and then
developmentalism and then you know state-centric uh development with NGOs and so on, and all the
different forms of patriarchy and power structures that exist. um it's not to say that you know we
haven't been resilient and we need to be resilient now uh yes people have been resilient but at the
same time it often uh abdicates people like you know you should be resilient um good on you for
being resilient so that's some of the wider like the broad range critique in terms of thinking
about if I understood the question in terms of uh resilience uh narratives as opposed to what
I said was that you know people's ability to adapt cope and renew so some of the resilience narratives
also uses those terms but we're not entirely sure what they mean by that um what I want to do again
is start from the margins right? Start from what makes people able to cut to cope or to adapt or
to renew or to feel like they have well-being how can we define well-being away from this obsession
with economic growth at the same time how do we enable economic growth for those who have been
made so impoverished over time? So it's a balancing act right? so it's about thinking about
what are the ways that some feminist insights help us think about uh not just getting into the latest
buzzword like resilience but recognize that yes resilience as a word in the vernacular does have
a role in society but what are the ways perhaps let's say resilience projects are being rolled out
and whose name are the role being rolled that what kind of financial uh commitments are being
made who are the actors involved what are the um sort of the matrices by which they're measuring
success um who are the people involved, who are the target population or the beneficiaries to say?
So one of the ways I think um I'd like to see the conversations move forward is to think about
you know climate justice gives us a set of tools with which to critique but it also gives us a set
of tools to think about um you know the need to reimagine differently and it also centers
indigenous knowledge globally in terms of those kinds of reparative relationships about care
networks, about reciprocity, what helps people have a sense of well-being or renew their livelihood or
feel like they have well-being for their children outside of however a resilience narrative may be
defined by outsiders. How do people understand it themselves while at the same time recognizing
there's a lot of indoctrination that happens with western education in terms of the way indigenous
knowledge um and even schooling across the global south have been kind of homogenized to be a very
westernized eurocentric form of education so these are the kinds of conversations you need to
have so it's a constant balancing act of offering something talking about something but with caveats
and it can be frustrating trust me I live this life all the time so but at the same time
recognize that if you don't have caveats you don't know what your own limitations are and what needs
reflection and it and needs that continual intellectual and emotional labor investments
and I think that is what I would like people to do in terms of at all points along
the decision making hierarchy all the way from the top to all the way to people who are doing
implementation what are the ways that that's both flexible and agile but also critically
reflexive and willing to learn over time and and to learn uh to center different voices instead
of people who are coming up with resilience um you know discourses and designs. Thank you and it is 2:30
and I did I want to repeat that we're going to stay on a few minutes uh I want to thank you.
I think that was a great wrap-up actually um but I want to just say one thing so thank you all for
attending thank you so much Dr. Sultana for speaking with us. We shared a short survey we're going to
send it out also, it's really important for us in order to get funding to bring great speakers so
it'll take one minute, two minutes of your time to do it. I want to say our next speaker is uh also
from Bangladesh, Afrina Choudhury with Worldfish Bangladesh. She'll be speaking on experiences and
merging gender transformative approaches with development efforts and aquatic food systems
in Bangladesh. That's April 14th and so again we might stay 10-15 minutes and uh I will put Claudia's
question into the chat again so you can see it so just want to let people
leave who had planned to spend an hour with us but thank you Doctor Sultana to agree to stay with us
just a few more minutes. Well thank you, everyone for coming, uh thank you for joining us, thank you
for the excellent questions um you know I hope this was an informative talk and I'm always happy
to be in contact. You have my website, my email is over there and please do feel free to read through
my publications in case they're helpful but also on my website, you'll find videos of my talks,
podcasts, op-eds and so on. So thank you again. Right so let's see is Claudia still here?
Do I see Claudia? Yes she's still here okay Claudia and uh I hope I'm pronouncing your
name right. She has a more general question beyond climate change but something that I think
you could also address and she asked for social justice dedicated to women
I would like to ask how much work is done in mental health
since one of the qualities of women is to be more sensitive in this regard and the most vulnerable.
Buenos dias. (Speaking in spanish)
(Speaking in spanish)
So just a quick translation basically since women are the most vulnerable and are suffering
disproportionately in things like flooding and so on then what are the what is being done in
the area of mental health to address women's needs in this area? Thank you
okay all right thank you um so I don't do my work doesn't
specifically focus on mental health, I've seen a few publications on mental health in terms of
climate change impacts but I always make this joke the unbearable whiteness of climate anxiety
it seems like mental health research has been largely done amongst white populations in the US,
Canada and Europe. uh so when we talk about uh people who are facing the disproportionate impacts
of climate change across the global south or black indigenous, and people of color communities
I haven't found a whole lot of research that does a systematic study of that you see a
lot of anecdotal evidence but then you don't see the amount of conversation taking up media pages
uh or mental health specialist attention in the US the way you see amongst the dominant population
and it's absolutely okay to have climate anxiety and eco grief that no one's invalidating that.
What I'm saying is the discussion has been really crowded like uh kind of uh crowded
in terms of centering certain people over others. I don't know about the gender-disaggregated data of
that but when we think about who's been paying the costs the longest so if you talk about two
indigenous women let's say indigenous women in Canada, there's some really well-known indigenous
female activists in both Canada and the US. They talk about what they've been doing, how
they've been resisting and fighting uh they don't necessarily talk about their mental well-being
right? They're talking about active strategies of resistance and survival if you'd look at
communities in the global south or you talk to women's movements who've been involved in various
climate or environmental justice related movements a lot of the conversation again
is about strategies about care networks, about collectivities, about solidarities and actions.
um but I haven't seen a whole lot of publications doing that systematic study of mental health um
so it would be absolutely important to do this I think and then to have resources available at hand
because the forms of suffering I was talking about isn't just material suffering in terms of like
water, housing, food, livelihood, it is absolutely about emotional and mental health as well
but we don't see a whole lot of allocation of budgetary resources for that right? We see things
that are much more material or practical that are visible to people but once you think about like
a livelihood flourishing or centering well-being, you do start to see that you are beginning to
address mental health and well-being in terms of if people have access to what is known as
Buen Vivir right? the good life then people are likely to have more mental resilience
and feel they're more connected to their kin to their other people but then also to be able
to provide for their families into the future. So I think that there's absolutely a connection between
material well-being and mental health well-being. I mean I think those are the kinds of ways um those
are the issues that do need more funding and research and also more attention in terms of
when we think about climate and colonialism who has it harmed the most and yet who are
we not hearing from the most when we talk about climate anxiety, climate grief or climate suffering.
Thank you, thank you for addressing that that question as well so um I would like to
give a moment for if there's any other questions otherwise I would like to let Dr. Sultana take a
break, she came to a straight from a class that she was teaching in her university and um uh
so do we have any take one minute, two minute, two seconds otherwise I'd like to just have a virtual
round of applause for Dr. Sultana and thank you so much. I'm so glad you could join us. Thank you,
thank you again for inviting me, thank you again so much for inviting me I really appreciate this and
to everyone who's still hanging on uh thank you for being here um and for the excellent questions.
All right we'll let you go. Take care, thank you, everyone! Bye, everyone! Thank you!